Essentials of UI Design XXIV: Things to Avoid in UX Design
Poor UX design happens when designers’ efforts fail to meet the needs of real users. This may stem from the final product not solving their problems or being difficult or confusing to use. This article explores common design fails to avoid to make the most of UI inspirations available on UILand.
Common UX Mistakes Designers Should Avoid
Bad UX design is often a function of factors such as:
Shallow understanding of target users
Confusing navigation flow
Convoluted user interfaces
Unclear visual hierarchy (or a lack of it)
Slow system performance
Disregard for user feedback
Little consideration for accessibility
Knowing the likely causes of bad UX design, we need to understand why they happen too.
Insufficient user research
User research empowers the designer with valuable insights about their users with respect to their desires, expectations, motivations, needs, and pain points. It’s the designer’s bridge to empathy for the user, ensuring their understanding of users is not derived from assumptions. Therefore, your goal will be to create products that your target user needs or wants.
By combining your business goals with users’ urgent frustrations, product designers can develop a robust problem statement. Competitor research can provide some insights into this. Moreover, adopting proven UX research methods can help to reveal user-centric insights to resolve the problem statement.
You may also create user personas to contextualize and represent your target users. Then, you can use empathy mapping techniques to find emotional context for each persona.
Cluttered UI
Users tend to struggle with cluttered user interfaces. Such UI can be distracting and increase cognitive overload. So, having too many elements or information can make navigation challenging.
It’s best to only use UI elements that the user needs for every screen within a product. Proximity, negative space, and other UI design principles are prominent on UILand screens showing the most essential features. They help to minimize cognitive strain for users.
Incoherent navigation
Unclear navigation undermines usability, therefore your products need consistent layouts and familiar navigation aids for users.
Establishing an unambiguous and consistent visual hierarchy conveys messaging on the order of importance across your product’s visual elements. It’s also helpful to use navigational aids your users are familiar with, including breadcrumbs, dropdown menus, and search bars. These familiar navigational aids lead to smoother user flow.
Conclusion
You can learn from user-centric, proven products to improve your UX design process. UILand is the resource you need to access so many of these products in one place. More than 150,000 curated screens and designs from top companies, each one detailing crucial user flows. We’re here to help designers deliver intuitive user navigation by using inspiration from past successes.
